Essays about Culture Page 216

The most acclaimed events in the marathon 1984 Los Angeles Olympic Arts Festival were productions by Ariane Mnouchkine’s Theatre du Soleil and Giorgio Strehler’s Piccolo Teatro di Milano. Their L.A. performances of Shakespeare and Goldoni were theatrical blockbusters. One was thrilled and envious to experience stage virtuosity that has no counterpart in our own country….

Frederick Neumann looks happy. Ruddy and white-haired, the 67-year-old member of Mabou Mines, New York’s legendary avant-garde collective, breaks into a grin so beatific that, like the Cheshire Cat’s, it seems to linger in the room long after its owner has departed. For that matter, Neumann’s conversation has a slightly Carrollian cast. Ask him a…

Anton Chekhov, a doctor, once said, “My holy of holies is the human body.” And the people in his plays, contrary to the way they’re often viewed, do have bodies. These are humans, in each other’s company, in a place. They’re also humans in our company, in a room with us. What Chekhov interpreters make…

British theatre people don’t get much busier than American lighting designer Rick Fisher, who this spring at last gets to make the splash in New York that he has been making in London for some time. His vehicle’stephen Daldry’s acclaimed Royal National Theatre production of An Inspector Calls, the J. B. Priestley revival which has…

Randall Duk Kim’s eyes light up as he exclaims about the remarkable times we live in, with new advancements in science, cosmology, astronomy – his mind, it seems, is always searching curiously for the exciting, the unexplainable. But the twinkle as he ponders the idea of dark matter making up 98 percent of the universe…

Listen to the music, music doesn’t lie,” a middle-aged, married man tells the young man he is seducing in a stateroom on board the Titanic in Michael John LaChiusa’s new musical, Hello Again. Some important people in musical theatre – the kind who make and shape careers – have been listening to LaChiusa’s music and…

She is reluctant to continue our conversation. “I don’t want to lose my job,” she murmurs into the phone. We are discussing an incredibly sensitive topic: smoking in the theatre. She is a nonsmoker and a playwright who makes her living in theatre administration, and she – like a number of People I spoke with…

Brad Fraser is accustomed to nervous board members getting cold feet when their theatres schedule productions of his controversial plays. And when the 31-year-old Canadian playwright encounters opposition to his shows-most of which make use of explicit sexuality, profanity and violent imagery – his impulse is to fight back quickly and hard. Last fall, the…

Eight years in the making, From the Bowery to Broadway: Lew Fields and the Roots of American Popular Theater is theatre history with an epic sweep. At the center of this vibrant, richly detailed pageant of American show business from the 1880s to the Great Depression is an archetypal American hero, a Jewish immigrant named…

My soul today is heaven on earth / O could the transport last,’” sing two women at the end of the first scene of Brian Friel’s recent play, Wonderful Tennessee. And in answer to the question posed in the hymn, one wants to shout – as Angela, one of the play’s six mortality-haunted characters, will…